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posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 02 2015, @02:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the carbon-queen?-more-like-awesomeness-queen dept.

ArsTechnica interviewed Millie Dresselhaus, professor emeritus at MIT:

Millie Dresselhaus, Institute Professor at MIT (and the first woman ever so honored). The occasion was her receiving the IEEE Medal of Honor (again, the first female recipient), but a look at her Wikipedia biography shows that awards are nothing new for Dresselhaus. Highlights of a long list include the National Medal of Science and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and her Kavli Prize in Nanoscience was the only Kavli awarded to a single recipient, an indication of how pioneering her research has been.

She also has administrative chops. She headed the Department of Energy's Office of Science, was president of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and held the post of treasurer at the National Academies of Science.
...
Ars: Your thesis advisor didn't think that women should be doing science. Why stick with science despite that level of discouragement?

Dresselhaus: Encouragement is always useful, but it's not necessarily the rate-limiting step. Luckily for me, Sputnik came along, and there was funding available for basic science research. My advisor wasn't so happy with me, but I could just work for myself. My thesis was very, very cheap. There was all this surplus equipment that was left from World War II that was lying in a bin someplace, and you could pick it up, renovate it at almost zero cost. So that was my thesis.

Ars: So you adopted the hardware to your needs?

Dresselhaus: Yeah, pretty much, and I built a few other things for myself. Which helped me learn how to build things, design something. This is valuable experience. Maybe if I had more spoon-feeding like we do today, I wouldn't have benefited as much. On the other hand, people think that they wouldn't survive if they didn't have a great deal of support. And maybe that's necessary today. Science is moving so fast, and you can't linger too much.

Very cool that she got started recycling surplus equipment for her thesis.


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  • (Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday August 02 2015, @04:02PM

    by Lagg (105) on Sunday August 02 2015, @04:02PM (#217032) Homepage Journal

    I like how they interviewed one of the most heavily awarded women in science - one of the pioneers in nanotech even though she was working when it wasn't even called that - and yet still couldn't resist shoehorning in the obligatory sensational questions.

    Your thesis advisor didn't think that women should be doing science. Why stick with science despite that level of discouragement?

    Keep in mind that they asked this directly after she said that her work makes her happy and she does it mostly out of personal interest. I admire her purely for not laying the cluebat down when they said "why stick with science". Like, opposed to what? Religion or homemaking?

    You were the first female faculty member at MIT?

    A Nobel Prize winner recently made some comments about how it might be easier to have labs segregated by sex so there isn't a risk of emotional entanglements.

    These aren't questions that would be asked if a man was the interviewee, because it seems stupid and insulting to the main subject. It's without a doubt pretty damn cool that she got her start in an era where "get back in the kitchen" was a sincere demand. But what I find more amazing is that she hacked together equipment from WW2 surplus. It's also a pretty profound statement (even if unintentional and born of necessity) to repurpose junk that was itself repurposed for use in war to do productive research. Furthermore, this woman is so badass that she managed to get an honorary doctorate from a Catholic university for her work at a scale that tends to make religious types rethink their life. But I guess asking for a story about that just couldn't occupy one of the "how about dem women?" questions were occupying. They're clearly just too important.

    Honestly though in the end it doesn't matter. This is what her concluding answer was and I think if there's one answer to take anything away from it's this:

    Ars: Is there anything you'd like to say to our audience?

    Dresselhaus: I just encourage them to do their thing and express their professional interest and have some tolerance for all people who are working hard and are contributing to all our fields. The end result is that we're working for society, the betterment of society, and it has historically been related to invention. And whoever contributes to that should be encouraged.

    --
    http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @04:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @04:12PM (#217034)

    She was a tomboy, which was probably what women needed to be back in those days to get ahead in science or engineering. Nowadays, as she says, better than 50 percent of MIT enrollment is female, which I found surprising.

  • (Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday August 02 2015, @04:18PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Sunday August 02 2015, @04:18PM (#217036) Journal

    I'm going to disagree here. I believe it highlights how far feminism has fallen. She would be old enough to have been aware of Amazon Feminism [wikipedia.org]. In modern feminism, especially here in flyover country, all we do is sit around and blame others (all assigned males), wring our hands, and bitch. In older versions of feminism, the answer to “Women shouldn't do science. Get back in the kitchen.” was “Fuck you. I'm going to do science.”

    A lot of the old attitudes about a woman's role in a man's world still persist and are parroted by cisgendered women. They teach their daughters by action and word that a woman's place is to have babies first, get child support checks, then work a minimum wage job in order to procure government benefits. I'm aware things might be different on the west coast, but I see it left and right over here in flyover country.

    It's important to highlight her struggle and her determination to follow her heart despite the prevailing attitudes of the time. Maybe it'll help a girl in high school somewhere who's been told her entire life that being a woman means having babies and nothing more to question that narrative. The alternative is that nothing happens and science and tech continue to be careers women stay away from because of the self-fulfilling prophecy that those are just careers for misogynerds.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @09:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @09:39PM (#217114)

      While there are some child supporter types around, most of the women out here seem to either forgoe children, get a boyfriend they can support, or try and find a guy who can support them and entrap him with children.

      I've met one of each category, plus had anecdotal stories of others since.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @03:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @03:11AM (#217209)

    I got to hear her give a talk on the history of her carbon research fairly recently. Fortunately, it was to a scientific audience so it was light on the kind of questions you're talking about.